Sheldon Museum of Art Main Content
Valdez, Crying
The Crying Tree2010Acrylic on canvas48 1/4 × 60U-5740.2012University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation
Patssi ValdezThe Los Angeles landscape figures prominently in Patssi Valdez’s serigraphs, mixed-media collages, and performance work. Here she represents her hometown in a more oblique manner than usual, offering us a surreal, dream-like scene. The Crying Tree depicts an eerie, anthropomorphic landscape that is paradoxically exuberant and melancholy. At the center of the canvas is the tree itself, a Daliesque figure that extends its limbs operatically, its flesh weeping. The surrounding vegetation appears to act in symphony: tears suggest themselves as a sort of music through which all nature communicates.
American
1951Los Angeles, CA
Patssi ValdezThe Los Angeles landscape figures prominently in Patssi Valdez’s serigraphs, mixed-media collages, and performance work. Here she represents her hometown in a more oblique manner than usual, offering us a surreal, dream-like scene. The Crying Tree depicts an eerie, anthropomorphic landscape that is paradoxically exuberant and melancholy. At the center of the canvas is the tree itself, a Daliesque figure that extends its limbs operatically, its flesh weeping. The surrounding vegetation appears to act in symphony: tears suggest themselves as a sort of music through which all nature communicates.
American
1951Los Angeles, CA